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When the Sheil Catholic Center celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1989, a group of talented and dedicated associates researched and wrote a history of the first 50 years. We are reprinting that history here.

The First Thirty Years - An Overview

"For over a quarter of a century the Catholic students attending Northwestern University have tried, on various occasions, to organize themselves into a body to preserve and foster the ideals of Catholicity that they dearly cherished. Time and again their efforts proved in vain. Each failure, however, became but another stone in the foundation of the Sheil Club, which last year sought for the first time its place in campus life. The Club is named to honor The Most Rev. Bernard J. Sheil, founder of the Catholic Youth Organization, for his notable work on behalf of America's youth. The group has grown from a small nucleus of six interested and industrious students to one of the outstanding religious organizations at the University. It has made progress in fostering the spiritual, educational and social interests of the Catholic young people attending classes at Northwestern."
-- From a 1940 concert program for the Paulist Choristers presented in Scott Hall by the Sheil Club.

The six students who acted on the idea for an organization for the approximately 600 Catholics at Northwestern in 1939 were Edmund Walsh, Irene Lundgren, Helen Scholl, Thomas Neville, Bill Lopez, and Lolita Badzmierowski.

Having obtained approval for their project from university president Walter Dill Scott, a long-time advocate of religious activity among undergraduates, they traveled down to the chancery of the Archdiocese of Chicago to obtain official church sanction. There, a fortuitous meeting took place. George Cardinal Mundelein, the ordinary of the archdiocese was out, but Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, the vicar general, was in, and it he whom they met.

With characteristic enthusiasm, Bishop Sheil fully embraced the project. At a meeting that very evening at the rectory of Saint Andrew's Church, where he was pastor, the club was born. To show their appreciation, the students wisely named their organization the Sheil Club. Thus began a close and enriching relationship that lasted until the bishop's death and beyond, for his spirit was bred into the club and continues to inspire it. Significantly, the only organization or building that today bears the name of great churchman is our Sheil Center.

On Sunday, Oct. 15, 1939, the new club held a dedicatory communion breakfast at the Orrington Hotel. Bill Lopez, the club's first president, introduced Bishop Sheil and Northwestern's new president, Franklin Bliss Snyder, as speakers.

The venture met with some opposition from a few anti-Catholic members of the campus community. University officials, however, were supportive, including President Snyder, who attended and spoke at the club's inaugural communion breakfast. Some opposition also came form certain Catholics who felt that no Catholic should ever attend a non-Catholic school, much less encourage that practice through a Catholic club on a secular campus. And Northwestern, founded by the Methodist church and still with ties to that church was not only non-Catholic, it was Protestant! Besides, it was a football "enemy" that sometime even beat Notre Dame!

At the time, the YMCA and the YWCA were the only religious groups at the university. In 1939-40, the university board of religion, established in 1937 by the trustees who were then elected by the Methodist Church, was expanded to include student, alumni, and faculty representatives. Its new role "was to cooperate with the churches in Evanston in presenting campus programs and to assist the larger denominations and religious organizations in finding housing near the campus." The result was the appearance of other religious groups on the campus in the early '40s. The first university chaplain was appointed in 1946, and regular Sunday chapel services started in Lutkin Hall in 1948.

The number of Catholic students at the club's origin in 1939 was relatively small -- about 10% of the Evanston campus enrollment -- and the number of Catholic faculty members was hardly noticeable.

One of them, an elderly professor of the classics said: "When I was at Harvard, there were a good number of Catholic students, but they were the first members of their families to attend a university. Thus their primary interest was getting established in society, and they went into the more lucrative professions of medicine, law, and business. But wait until their children come along, the next generation, comes along, and you'll find that more will go into the more scholarly professions of teaching and research."

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